Spark Sport reaches 60,000 livestreams on an exciting opening night of Rugby World Cup 2019
Spark Sport had a very successful Rugby World Cup debut tonight, with almost 60,000 customers tuning in live to watch
the opening ceremony and hosts Japan beat Russia 30 points to 10.
This makes it one of the highest viewed live streamed sport events in New Zealand and a record for Spark Sport. We are
particularly pleased with the amount of people who chose to watch via the app especially as the evening’s coverage was
also shown live and free to air via TVNZ.
Spark Sport is happy with how things worked throughout the night from the commentary and production right through to
technical delivery. The streaming service worked well across all devices and the content delivery network (CDN) servers
delivering the coverage to New Zealanders operated well within their capacity. Spark’s broadband network performed well,
as did the networks of other broadband providers.
That said, we recognise that a small number of our customers (less than 1% of those watching) experienced isolated
technical issues mostly related to in-home setup. The only common issue we saw across a small group of customers related
to some Samsung Smart TV users who switched to watch something else on their TV without first exiting the Spark Sport
app. Our care teams helped customers resolve this.
During the rugby coverage Spark Sport also successfully streamed a number of other sporting events, including official
practice from the F1 Singapore Grand Prix.
We’re expecting many more New Zealanders to watch Saturday’s 3 matches live on Spark Sport, with coverage starting at
4:15pm with Australia vs Fiji, followed by France vs Argentina at 6:45pm and culminating with coverage of the All Blacks
vs South Africa commencing at 8:45pm (kick off 9:45pm). We strongly encourage everyone who has not already tried out
their Spark Sport app to jump in as early as possible and test their devices and in-home setup. They can watch the
opening ceremony and first match on demand or there is a library of rugby content such as famous matches, documentaries
and analysis shows they can use to try out the platform.
We have substantially increased our Spark Sport care teams to help our customers get set up throughout the day.
Customers can reach us via our help site help.sparksport.co.nz and via our social channels (Facebook and Twitter).